Here’s the info for the Winter Malifaux story league. If necessary I will update this first post with any additional information or clarifications as they come up in discussions.

This will be a Narrative League composed of a set of linked Story Encounters that will tell a (hopefully entertaining) story. When posting results of a league game played, feel free to get as creative as you’d like in any details you provide (looking at you Alex).

General Info:~~~The league will last for 7 weeks during which time there will be 4 Story Encounters presented. At the end of the 7 weeks, in order to be considered for the league rankings and prize(s) you must have completed all 4 of the Story Encounters presented. They do not need to be played in order; they only need to be finished in the 7 week span. You may of course participate in the league and play games against whomever without finishing the full 4 Encounter spread, you simply won’t be eligible for any potential prizes at the end.

Assuming a game played every week, you will have 3 weeks/games “leftover” if you want/need them. These can be used to replay specific Encounters and the best results for that Encounter will be kept for ranking purposes at the end, so long as all 4 separate Encounters have been played. Games can be played outside the Eagles of course but you cannot play more than the 7 total games that would be available for the 7 weeks.

~~~Given the flexible nature of the format, opponent selection for league games will be open choice amongst whoever is available that’s participating. The only restriction is that you may not play more than 3 league games against the same opponent.

~~~There will be prizes of some kind at the end of this. Maybe they’ll be good, maybe they’ll be shit, but there’ll be something. Once I have more specific I’ll post it up here. (As a note, I will be playing in the league but since I’m organizing it I will be considering myself ineligible for any prizes.)

Game-level Info:

Story Encounters will be posted each week with any extra rules or specific limitations listed. Unless specified in the Encounter post, Attacker and Defender role assignment will be determined before play begins via high card selection as normal. Unless a specific condition is indicated in the Encounter post, one player will flip to determine what the Defender's Victory condition is and then the roles may be picked.

All other setup processes will remain as written in the rules (terrain definition, deployment zone determination and choice, etc).

As these are Story Encounters, Scheme selection is of course open choice from the book including any relevant Faction specific schemes.

All League games must be 50SS in size. As indicated in the sign up post, this is Fixed Master and Fixed Faction. All other hiring rules/restrictions must be followed. Wave 2 models are allowed but the player must have the most up-to-date version of the card at time of play to use it. Avatar rules (if they’re available) will not be allowed.

In order to be counted as a completed league game, a game must progress through at least the end of Turn 3. Games ending sooner due to forfeit/concession are fine but “timed out” games ending before Turn 3 will not be counted.

After Game reports:After a completed league game I will need the following info either PM’ed to me or posted as a follow up in the original game request thread.

Player Names

Specific Story Encounter played

Scheme’s chosen by each player

Total VP’s earned for Winner and Loser

League Schedule:

The league will begin the first week of February and go for 7 weeks, ending the 3rd week of March. *Due to snow, the league end date has been extended to March 31. All games must be completed by then.

I will post up the 4 Story Encounters being used for league games (along with any relevant details for them) on the Mondays of the first 4 weeks. So the 1st available Story Encounter will be posted and the leageue will officially begin on Monday 2/3/14.

As a reminder, once we're fully into it, league games do not need to be played in order.

League StandingsCompletion:

1st Army Matt

2nd Ian

3rd Alex

4th Ed

5th Zombie Matt

6th Jeremy

7th Jonah

Everyone else TBD

Overall:

1st Army Matt

2nd Ian

3rd Alex

4th Ed

5th Zombie Matt

6th Jeremy

7th Jonah

8th Adam

9th Travis

10th Greg

Everyone else TBD

Faction Standings:

1st Outcast

2nd Neverborn TIED

2nd Ten Thunder TIED

4th Guild

5th Gremlin

6th Ressurectionist

7th Arcanist

Current Outstanding League games listing

Zhent: all 4

Alex: Completed

Jeremy: Completed

Greg: Weeks 2, 3, 4

Ian: Completed

Zombie Matt: Completed

Ed: Completed

Adam: Weeks 3, 4

Army Matt: Completed

Brad: all 4

Jack: all 4

Fred: all 4

Kiernan: all 4

Jonah: Completed

Travis: Weeks 2, 4

I think this about covers most of the big items. If you have any questions or concerns or if I need to clarify anything please let me know below and I’ll update this post as necessary.

Last edited by Jonasty on Fri Mar 28, 2014 12:59 pm, edited 27 times in total.

Do both players playing in a League Game have to be using their League declared Master/Faction?

For instance... Willie B is a new Malifaux player with (hypothetically let's say 3) not many games under his belt. He declares (again hypothetically) that he's going to play Zoraida in the Neverborn faction. He's enthusiastic and gets his games in using just 2 sessions (2 games each) and now he's at four! He's definitely Johnny-On-The-Spot! Now he decides for grins that he might want to try Zoraida as an Outcast, or perhaps he wants to try Lillith, or even, heaven forbid and remember it's just hypothetical, Soniaa Criid! Does he have to find a "non league game" - an endeavor he might be completely out of luck in accomplishing, or can he play someone else looking for a League game and his just doesn't count towards his scoring?

I.e Do both sides of a "League Game" have to be League Lists or if a Noob just happens to walk in, could someone play them a Malifaux game and as long as it's one of the Story Encounters have it count as one of their official ones?

afeinman wrote:That is crazy flexible and sounds like it will work even with everyone being busy!

That's the hope! I'm really trying to get as many people involved in this as possible.

Are you crafting some sort of master plotline where individual games will impact each other?

There will be some interaction between games but not a crazy amount. Because of the flexibilty of the format the Encounters will need to be fairly straightforward as different folks will be playing them at different times although I'll be peppering them with little things in my own way.

There will be some downstream impacts based on Faction performance though which is why it's Fixed Faction. I'm still hashing out the details of that at this point. That's also a little further off and probably won't impact the League play directly. Something I'm working on putting in place to allow for a living story/world to be played in that's tied together by the leagues, tournaments, "sanctioned" Eagles games, etc that I hope will start happening from here. But right now the focus is the league itself. (Longwinded but I felt the best answer. )

(Also, how does the Malifaux community handle the constant 'death' in games, as far as people still being around in the fluff after being 'killed'?)

Well it depends on the character and the fluff. For named characters, usually it's the standard "They were gravely wounded and dragged off by a minion to fight another day." There are exceptions though of course. Seamus actually died at the end of one of the books and was resurrected by Molly using a powerful artifact.

As far as deaths in the game mechanically, it's easiest to think of them as the example above of limping off in defeat. There is a campaign system for Malifaux that allows for character growth and updates including actual character death, almost like a mini-RPG on the edges of the skirmish game. That would be something that is best run like a league, with a finite time limit. I've thought of exploring that at some point down the line but that will require more commitment and book keeping from folks so I thought it best to make sure everyone's got a firm grasp of things before suggesting it.

Do both players playing in a League Game have to be using their League declared Master/Faction?

For instance... Willie B is a new Malifaux player with (hypothetically let's say 3) not many games under his belt. He declares (again hypothetically) that he's going to play Zoraida in the Neverborn faction. He's enthusiastic and gets his games in using just 2 sessions (2 games each) and now he's at four! He's definitely Johnny-On-The-Spot! Now he decides for grins that he might want to try Zoraida as an Outcast, or perhaps he wants to try Lillith, or even, heaven forbid and remember it's just hypothetical, Soniaa Criid! Does he have to find a "non league game" - an endeavor he might be completely out of luck in accomplishing, or can he play someone else looking for a League game and his just doesn't count towards his scoring?

I.e Do both sides of a "League Game" have to be League Lists or if a Noob just happens to walk in, could someone play them a Malifaux game and as long as it's one of the Story Encounters have it count as one of their official ones?

It's totally fine if a League player wants to play a non League player (or League player using one of their non League crews) and have that count as the individual person's League game. So long as the game played adheres to the rules/format for the specific encounter that's totally cool. Just make sure when reporting the results of the game to indicate who is and isn't playing a League game in the match up. It should be fairly obvious from the selections but I just want to make sure things are clear for me when I'm having a dumb shit moment.

This looks fantastic!! I'm excited, and it will force me to show my face at the Eagles more often!

As an aside, down the road (i.e. a future league like this), we could even incorporate the RPG (which some of us KSed) to enhance the story element EVEN more. I'm really excited for this and am loving that there are tons of more Malifaux players to play with!

Jonah, thanks for organizing this, putting us other Henchman to shame :p

P.S. I still need to have my mini-faux event on a Tuesday in February, so I may miss the first week of this, but with the flexibility you built in I think I can get in enough games!

Latest update for league info. (I'm copying this into the first post as well.)

League Schedule:

The league will begin the first week of February and go for 7 weeks, ending the 3rd week of March.

I will post up the 4 Story Encounters being used for league games (along with any relevant details for them) on the Mondays of the first 4 weeks. So the 1st available Story Encounter will be posted and the leageue will officially begin on Monday 2/3/14.

As a reminder, once we're fully into it, league games do not need to be played in order.

I've added a League Standings section to the first post of this thread. As I receive results from people I'll update this accordingly.

Overall vs Completion: Overall standings are for everyone in the League, regardless of how many games they've played. Completion standings will only show for people who have finished the 4 separate encounters that qualify them for prizes and such at the end. (So obviously Completion will be blank for the next few weeks as we're getting our games in.)

Faction Standing: There's nothing in place for this specifically but more just an interesting metric on how the games are going at the Faction level.

I've updated the first bullet of the Game Level-info section for clarification as it was pointed out that it was essentially written backwards.

When setting up the game, if the Defender's victory condition is supposed to be random (which will generally be the case unless otherwise indicated by me in the Encounter description) that determination occurs first and then Attacker/Defender roles are assigned. That way the person choosing knows what Defender role they would be choosing.

Lilith was successful in rescuing the enslaved nephilim from the guild. he had recently overheard plans of an ambush on zoraida. when discovering this Lilith immediately decides she must warn the hag, although the two consider themselves allies zoraida hasn't trusted Lilith since the tots wreaked havoc on the bayou she knew it was critical to bring the rescued nephilim. en route on the outskirts of the city Lilith ran into a very dangerous obstacle, Tara.

week 1 escort Lilith(attacker)(4) v. Tara (defender-delay the escort)(0). flank deployment. I chose assassinate(3) and framed for murder(3) both unrevealed and Adam chose plant evidence(3) and deliver a message (3) both revealed, we both scored max on our schemes so it came down to the encounter which was decided by initiative on the last turn

This may be a dumb question but... Is each person's ranking tied to their aggregate points scored? As in max score for the league is 40, 10 points per game? Or is score based on point differential in any given game?

As in is the value of a 10-9 victory vs a 10-1 victory identical for the winner?

It will default to aggregate in general but will use differential when necessary. So in the instance where three of you scored 10 points, then for the competition portion we'd go off differential. For the overall standings I'm just short handing based on aggregate so the 3 of you are "tied" for 1st place.

Differential in story encounters doesn't seem right just because a lot of the matchups can be so unbalanced. Also unlike standard encounters you can't always score VP each turn, its usually at end of game ( a la 1.5).